


Scars of a General (Obi-Wan Kenobi)

by thespareoom



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Kadavo (Star Wars), Slavery, Violence, Zygerria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:06:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25671796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thespareoom/pseuds/thespareoom
Summary: You attempt to heal Obi-Wan after he returns from Kadavo, and he breaks down, momentarily.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Reader, Obi-Wan Kenobi/You
Comments: 2
Kudos: 56





	Scars of a General (Obi-Wan Kenobi)

Like so many times before, you enter Obi-Wan’s quarters without announcing your presence, but this time, everything is different. His energy is darker than you’ve ever felt before, clouded by emotions you struggle to understand. He’s wearing only trousers tied loosely around his hips, and when his eyes meet yours, all you see there is emptiness. He quickly turns away from you and throws his cloak over his shoulders to hide the marks on his body he knows you’ve already seen. Slowly, you walk closer and reach around him, catching the cloak in your hand.  
“Let me see,” you whisper to his back, and he lets go, allowing you to slide the cloak gently back off him. You rest your palms on his back just under his shoulder blades. Your eyes close as you try to push some comfort through the Force to him. His skin feels warm and soft underneath your hands, but he’s tense, muscles wound up tight as he tries to pull back slightly from your touch. You know he wishes he could hide from you, but you have to see. You can’t let him sit here and suffer in silence, bearing the burden of his pain alone.  
Some of his scars are familiar to you, gained over the years of training and missions. You run a finger over a short one on top of his shoulder and remember the afternoon you gave it to him during a practice session years earlier. A bit of warmth sneaks into your chest as you trace the edges of the mark, faded with the time that had passed.   
But many of these scars were new. Red, angry marks crossed his back, wrapped around his arms, and scarred his chest. You suck a breath in and skim a finger, barely touching him, over one of these new scars. A chorus of screams fill your ears the second your hand brushes against his wound. Screams of pain and despair, hopelessness and suffering. The sound fills your ears, surrounding you and threatening to overwhelm you. But you don’t stop. His muscles tense under each touch but not from pain. These physical wounds are long closed up by now. But still, he hurts. He won’t say it, but you can feel it down to your bones. These injuries will heal, but will he?   
You move to a long mark that stretches from under his arm, across his back, ending above his hip. Slowly, you slide a finger gently along its path, and the shrieks echoing in your mind only grow louder. The sound of a whip cracks, so loud and close it could be right over your shoulder. You continue mapping out the lines marring his skin, unwilling to stop despite the anguish filling your ears, unwilling to let him hold on to this pain alone. As you make your way across his back, tracing the welts, the cries grow louder still, filling the room even though you know they are only audible to you alone. Tears begin to sting your eyes as his voice becomes distinct from all the others.  
You loop an arm around his waist and pull him closer to you, resting your forehead against his bare back. He relaxes slightly, almost imperceptibly into your touch, but he’s still carrying so much tension, trying desperately to hold himself together. You press your lips softly against him, kissing the length of his scars, trying to heal him the only way you can. Incomplete images start to flash through your mind. A whip cracking in the air, shackles on wrists, axes colliding with ore, over and over and over.Everything is colored red, with pain and fury and fire.   
Emotions collide into you, strong and demanding to be seen, felt, named, recognized. The emotions you expect come, of course, frustration, anger, suffering. But there are ones that shock you, buried underneath the others. Shame, hopelessness. Defeat. Emotions you’d never felt from Obi-Wan in all the years you’d known him. He feels broken. Your lips trace every wound on his skin and feel every lash that created them. His emotions overwhelm yours and become your own. You keep taking them in, feeling and seeing, hoping in vain that you might take his pain and bear it yourself instead.   
Slowly, he turns around to face you. His eyes are bloodshot red, and immediately, you know. You know he knows what you’ve seen. That he meant for you to see because he desperately needs you to understand.  
“I couldn’t…” He swallows before choking out, “I couldn’t help them.”  
And then he breaks, fully in two, and collapses into you. You barely have time to step forward to catch him before he crashes to the floor. All of his weight is leaned against you as you carry him over and lay him down in the bed. He curls into himself, silent sobs wracking his body. Tears stream in tracks down his cheeks as he finally lets go of all he’s been holding back. You pull him close to you, and he lets his face fall into the space where your neck and shoulder meet. He doesn’t have the energy to even put his arms around you, and so you hold him up, lying him down and folding yourself around him. Your fingers comb through his hair, a hand rests on his back. You hold him against you, hugging him tighter and tighter, trying to protect him from collapsing completely.   
Time blurs as he weeps. Every quiet wail that leaves his body leaves a new scar on your soul. The sun has long since set by the time his tears stop and his breathing becomes more even, eventually slowing into the soft noises of sleep. And only then, once he has escaped into slumber, did you let yourself break. You cry out without making any sound, chest heaving as you sob for him, for what he’s had to suffer in silence, alone.   
Morning comes, but the spot beside you where Obi-Wan should be is cold and empty. Exactly what you should have expected, but a hole opens up in your chest anyways. Because although he finally broke down, he can’t admit it, not even to himself. He won’t let it show in the light of day. He’ll go back to pretending to be whole and unbroken, unaffected by what he’s seen. The pain is still there, written in his eyes, if you looked closely enough. But then again, people rarely did. They only saw what they wanted to see: a Jedi and a general, determined to never fail.


End file.
